NCAA Football 14 game artwork
Developed by Electronic Arts, the NCAA Football series does for the game of College Football what Madden NFL does for the National Football League.
Starting life as Bill Walsh College Football in 1994 and then College Football USA in 1997, EA acquired the licensing rights to the NCAA brand, including universities and teams, and officially rechristened the series with the release of NCAA Football 98.
Like its Madden sister series, it is praised for its realistic level of play while each release was among the best selling Sports Games of a given year. In addition to single-player and online games, the series features "Dynasty Mode", which allows the player to take control of one of the NCAA's 100+ DI-A/FBS programs. This mode not only follows the team through the football season, but includes making coaching decisions, recruiting, and much more.
However, the series ran into legal issues and no new titles have been released since NCAA Football 14. Unlike Madden, which has a deal in place with the NFL Player's Union to use the likenesses of real NFL players, the NCAA Football series does not use real college players as they are considered to have "amateur" status and cannot be paid according to NCAA rules. Instead, they are simply referred to by jersey number, as well as information like height, weight, age, and year of school. (The cover athlete has always been a player who has graduated and/or is heading to the NFL, allowing him to be paid for the use of his likeness.) A series of legal disputes involving the NCAA and college athletes has further muddied the water, leading to the suspension of the series.
In February 2021, EA announced that a new game is finally in development, tentatively titled EA Sports College Football. They have secured the rights to use most of the NCAA FBS schools (most notably missing Notre Dame and albeit without the license to the NCAA itself). Helping the series return to production was a change in NCAA policy that took effect a few months later; while college players still cannot be paid directly by the schools, they are now eligible to accept "Name, Image, and Likeness" deals, which may allow the players to be compensated for being featured in the game. The new game is scheduled for a 2024 release and will feature an "Ultimate Team" mode just like its Madden and FIFA Soccer sister series.
The series contains examples of:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: As noted in the Artistic License – Sports entry below, the game's roster limits - while inaccurate - serve to prevent the player from turning the game into a total joke. Most reasonably skilled players will eventually reach a point where they're routinely bringing in the best recruiting classes in the country, and a 70-man limit is basically the only way to prevent them from signing all of the best players every year.
- After-Action Report: Common on enthusiast forums. Some are simple, taking the form of faux-newspaper reports or blog entries following a team's season as if it were real, reporting on performances, injuries, off-season moves, and the like. Others take on more of a narrative element, with highly unrealistic and outright impossible scenarios unfolding.
- A.I. Breaker: Quite a few offensive plays can be used infinitely and the AI will never catch on. Exactly which plays vary from year to year as the AI is tweaked, but there has yet to be an iteration of the game which doesn't include at least a few of these.
- Announcer Chatter: Naturally. It was rather clunky in the early iterations of the series but has gotten much smoother over time.
- Annual Title: From 1995 to 2014, when the series was suspended due to the nebulous legal situation around the use of player likenesses in a game without compensation.
- Artistic License – Military: The height and weight limits for the service academies are effectively ignored in the game. Further more, athletes from these colleges can still be drafted straight out of "college" without going through mandatory military service.
- Artistic License – Sports: The games imposed various roster limits over the years, ranging from 55 in the early days of the series to 70 in the last edition. In real life, teams can give out 85 scholarships and keep many more players on the roster as walk-ons (basically, a player without a scholarship). This limit basically exists to prevent the player from utterly monopolizing the game's talent base, as most players will end up dominating in recruiting at a certain point.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Many plays in the playbook take too long to develop or rely on trickery that doesn't fool the AI, so they never get used. Examples include reverses, double reverses, reverse passes...basically anything more "tricky" than a play-action or a draw.
- Borrowing from the Sister Series: This series and Madden have a history of borrowing features which debuted in the other. Probably the most divisive addition was the Ultimate Team mode in NCAA 14, which was carried over to the revival.
- But Thou Must!: The series imposes roster minimums for each position, and it will fill the depth chart if you fail to do so. Want to run a wide-open spread offense and clear a roster spot by ignoring the fullback position? The AI will auto-generate a (god-awful) walk-on who counts against your overall roster limit. You'll never use him, but he'll be on your roster for four years unless you recruit someone better...at a position you don't care about.
- Capcom Sequel Stagnation: A common criticism of the series. Most iterations change very little from the previous, save for updating the rosters. The developers do try to add new modes and features, but ultimately, a game emulating a real life sport can only add so much while still being faithful.
- Character Customization: You can create your own custom players or add your favorite players that were left out of the game for one reason or another while editing their name, appearance, and ratings. Notably, you can't just create a superstar and then add him to your team — he goes into the recruiting pool and you have to recruit him like you would any other AI-generated player. So there's a real chance that you can create a seven-foot tall cyborg death machine quarterback, only to see him sign with your most hated rival.
- Competitive Multiplayer: Naturally. Being able to play against your friends (initially on the same console with two controllers and later online) is one of the big selling points of the game.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
- The AI players will often react to things they shouldn't be able to see, meaning many plays which rely on that deception don't work in the game they way they should in real life.
- In an Inversion, the player, by default, gets to see things from 20 or 30 feet above the action, allowing a much wider field of view than what a player at field level gets to see.
- On the higher difficulty levels, the computer will have almost always have called a play that is specifically designed to counter whatever you just called.
- Players don't suffer many injuries in played games, but if you decide that there are a few games on the schedule that you don't want to bother with and let the computer simulate them, your roster will start to look like a hospital ward. It is possible to invert the trope, however, if you play out all your own team's games.
- Crack Defeat: With some skill, you can easily double or even triple NCAA single-game and season records with the players on your team. However, it is extremely common in these cases to lose the Heisman Trophy to a player with far inferior numbers. On a Meta-level, this is done to oppose AI abuse, as the game keeps track a player's sportsmanship, and it is not possible to so thoroughly destroy existing records without ruthlessly running up the score every single week.
- Creator Provincialism: The game is developed by the EA subsidiary Tiburon, which is based in Florida. There have been complaints dating back decades that the players for the major Florida universities receive higher ratings than their performances suggest.
- Cruelty Is the Only Option: As covered under Artistic License – Sports, the game includes a hard roster limit for competitive balance purposes, unlike real life. As such, it is much more challenging to "stash" developmental players. Since you are in competition with the other teams for recruits, if you deliberately limit yourself to open roster slots, the opposing teams will get stronger. So a common, almost necessary strategy is to heavily recruit some poor 17 year old all through his senior year of high school until he chooses you over your rivals. Then cut the poor boy before he even puts your jersey on once. Those recruits disappear from the game entirely.
- Crutch Character: Most transfers, just like in real life. Unless you are playing as one of the more prominent "football powerhouse" schools, you will rarely get exceptional transfer requests. However, the ones you do get tend to be at positions where you just had a player graduate, so they can be used to fill the gap. In order to get them, you must have at least one open scholarship and at least one open roster spot.
- Dark Horse Victory: Naturally, it is possible for a skilled player to guide a team with no realistic chance of winning the championship in real life to the title in-game.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect:
- There are often achievements for winning all of the various bowl game trophies. However, many of the bowl games are consolations for the schools who finished #2, #3, or lower in their conferences, so you'll need to lose 1-5 games to even play in them.
- Demolishing records with your star player should make him a shoo-in for the Heisman Trophy, right? So why does he lose it so often to players with far inferior stats? Well, to thwart AI abuse, the game keeps track a player's sportsmanship, and since it is not possible to so thoroughly destroy existing records without ruthlessly running up the score every single week, it works against your player when it comes to award voting.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first two iterations of the game were title Bill Walsh College Football and the series didn't get the rights to the NCAA brand, including universities and teams, until 98.
- Game-Breaking Bug:
- 11 received a doozy of a glitch after a patch: if a quarterback pump-fakes backwards (towards his own endzone), every single player on the defense will abandon their coverage assignments and charge him, leaving all wide receivers open deep.
- 12 includes showstopping bugs in Online Dynasty mode whereby the game can sometimes override a user game's score with a simmed game, resulting in a loss where there once was a win. It can even create a game out of whole cloth, showing a loss for a user on a bye week. This in a sport where even a single loss can cost you a National Championship bid. Then there is the possibility that the game might refuse to advance the week at all, a bug which affects all twelve players in the league.
- 14 has a severe bug where coaches will simply disappear from the offseason "Coaching Carousel". In some cases, they'll be replaced by a placeholder named "New Coach" with minimum ratings, no perks, and "-4" years left on his contract. In other cases, he is simply gone and the school lists "no previous coach". The only ways around it are to revert to a save before before starting the offseason and hope it doesn't happen again, or re-start your dynasty.
- Game Mod: Mods serving as unofficial roster updates for 14, the last game created in the series to date, are very popular. Graphical updates, while less common, also exist.
- God Modders: Extremely common in tournament and online play.
- Guide Dang It!: Many players believe that transfers, a vital part of the process in real life, are absent from the game. This is because many players keep their roster at the limit and use up all of their scholarships on incoming freshman. To get a transfer request, you need to have at least one of each still open. (Though good luck finding anywhere in the game that it tells you this.)
- Holiday Mode: For several iterations, EA had a partnership with the Weather Channel wherein the game would simulate the actual current weather at each stadium.
- Homing Boulders: It was common in the early generations of the series for passes, kicks, or even tacklers to travel in unusual, possibly unnatural ways to ensure the calculated result. Naturally, this has improved over the years with improvements in technology, but it is still possible to see examples where, for example, a tackle initiated from the side of the ball carrier inexplicably drives the ball carrier backwards by several yards.
- Joke Character: The majority of "walk-ons" (players not offered scholarships). Most are bottom-of-the-roster fodder with very limited ceilings.
- Mad Libs Dialogue: The in-game commentary. It was painfully obvious in the earlier generations of the game, where drastic changes in tone and inflection in the same sentence were common. (Ex. "CLEMSON has the ball SECOND and EIGHT from the TWENTY-SEVEN yard line...) As the years have gone on and technology has progressed (allowing storage of more recorded lines), this has become much more seamless. The commentary has a huge array of options and can handle not only unrealistic scenarios, but also provide team specific storylines over the course of a season.
- Mission-Pack Sequel: Just like Madden, a common criticism of the series is that each game is "just a roster update" from the previous year. The developers do attempt to add new modes and features, with how well these are received determining just how prevalent this complaint is from year to year.
- Multi-Platform: The early years varied between this and exclusivity on either the SNES or Sega Genesis. From 98 to 02, the game was Sony-exclusive. Starting with 03 and lasting through its suspension with 14, it was available on both the PlayStation and Xbox product lines (with Nintendo systems making the occasional appearance).
- Muscles Are Meaningless: Height and weight matter very little with regard to how well players block or shed blocks - only the ratings matter.
- My Rules Are Not Your Rules: The despised system for making phone calls to recruits which basically spins a roulette wheel of topics, allowing you the option of pitching your school's merits on that topic or discrediting your rivals on that topic. It's obnoxious enough that you, the head coach, can't choose to pitch whatever you want. This can lead to the bizarre result that the coach of Stanford might never get to sell his school's excellent academics or the coach of Miami can never sell the school's gorgeous campus. The AI controlled teams are not restricted in this way and will generally pitch/discredit whatever will be most beneficial to them. This was removed for 13.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The case for all in-game players. The games were not legally able to use actual player names, so they instead referred to existing real-life players by jersey number and position ("QB #15," for example), and the non-named players would possess the same physical characteristics of their corresponding real-life players. Even this became controversial as the courts began siding with the athletes in more and more legal rulings (attempts to argue that, say, a 6'3, 230-pound lefthanded quarterback wearing number 15 for the Florida Gators was not trying to capitalize on Tim Tebow's likeness didn't pass the smell test), leading to EA suspending the series in 2014. As of 2021, EA announced that they are reviving the series and have agreements in place to use nearly all 100+ FBS schools (Notre Dame being the major exception), and changes to NCAA rules may allow them to finally feature real players.
- Old Save Bonus: Most versions allow you to export players to the same year's version of Madden, where they are added to the fictional draft classes and can be selected in Franchise Mode.
- One Stat to Rule Them All: Although it varies by just how much it rules in the game from year to year, Speed has been the most important stat throughout the history of the series. It is common for speedy but otherwise mediocre players in real life to become elite superstars in the game itself due to the emphasis placed on speed. There are a few reasons for this: First, these "speed merchants" often block, tackle, and/or break tackles far better than their real life counterparts which eliminates their greatest weaknesses. Second, because passes are usually targeted to hit a player in the chest, it can be surprisingly difficult to run one of the most common plays in football - throw it high to the slow-but-tall receiver or tight end and let him use his size/reach to out-jump the defender to catch the pass.
- Randomly Generated Loot: The recruiting classes are made up of randomly generated players to recruit to your team. Everything from their names to their height/weight to their attributes are randomly created. They qualify as "loot" in the sense that they are valuable resources to add to your team.
- Skill Gate Characters: Pick any one of the traditional "power" programs - Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, LSU, etc. A relatively unskilled player can use their sheer overwhelming talent to beat AI opponents without much fuss. However, veteran players can easily defeat the unskilled players using these superior teams, even when using far less talented teams themselves thanks to their superior knowledge of the game.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Common in recruiting, which is very much Truth in Television. Lower-rated recruits may have highly unrealistic demands and expectations.
- Sports Game: One based on Collegiate American Football.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: Upon launch, 12 omitted Boston College vs. Virginia Tech from the playing schedule. However, the game's back end recognizes that it is there, and simulates the game without the player's input when you advance the weeks. Since even a single loss can put a team out of the running for a national championship and injuries are far more common in simulated games, players can easily lose the game and be eliminated from title contention through no fault of their own. Or, they could win the game but lose several star players, which can have the same effect overall. Other similar instances of this happening have been noted in other iterations of the game, including competitive online play.
- Video Game Delegation Penalty:
- This is especially prominent when playing defense. On offense, under most circumstances, you control whichever player has the ball. The other players will run their routes or block as designed, with their attributes (especially "Awareness") playing into how well they do these things. On defense, however, you can take control of any player. The ones you aren't controlling can almost certainly be expected to perform worse than they would under your control. One of the most prominent examples occurs when the opposing QB rolls out out of the pocket. Pursuing defenders have the option of either going for the QB (at which point the QB will try to pass the ball), or dropping back in coverage (at which point the QB will try to run with the ball). This is a desirable situation in real life for the offense, as it forces the defenders to choose and should leave one of the options open. However, in the game, if you are not controlling the closest pursuing defender, expect to see him get indecisive and hover in between, leaving both the pass and the run wide open. This can even happen with defenders who have maxed out Awareness.
- Skipping offseason events in Dynasty Mode leaves you wide open to this as the AI will complete them for you. Cue awful recruiting classes, players transferring away, and all sorts of other program mismanagement.
